Leaked slides detail Intel's 2013 Haswell architecture

We're still roughly five months away from Sandy Bridge's die shrink, Ivy Bridge, but Intel is already preaching the virtues of its 2013 microprocessor technology. Codenamed Haswell, the architecture was first announced during September's IDF with limited info, but freshly leaked slides have revealed further details. We already knew that Haswell would use the same 22nm fabrication process and 3D tri-gate transistors as Ivy Bridge to create an ultra-efficient package that reduces platform power by a factor of 20 without sacrificing performance.

Based on the latest information, Haswell will be a part of a platform dubbed "Shark Bay" and the chips will require entirely new motherboards -- desktop versions will interface via LGA-1150 while mobile iterations will use either rPGA947 or BGA1364. Desktop Haswell parts will carry two or four processing cores alongside an on-die graphics chip that supports DirectX 11. They'll also support Intel's Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost technologies as well as the AVX 2.0 instruction set, dual-channel DDR3 1600MHz RAM and PCI Express 3.0.

Haswell will come in various power brackets. Desktop chips will have a TDP of 35W and 95W, mobile variants will come in 37W, 47W and 57W TDPs, and low-voltage parts for ultrabooks will sip only 15W. This is expected to grant notebooks with "all-day" battery life. Back at IDF, Intel demoed a chip that was being powered by a single UV light pointed at a solar cell the size of a postage stamp. That efficiency will be further amplified in 2014 when Intel ships the 14nm die shrink of Haswell called Broadwell, but virtually no details are available on that yet.